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Trump Proposes Stripping Citizenship From Political Protesters

It a scene that is likely to prove quite familiar during a Trump
presidency, Americans woke up Tuesday to discover that the incoming
president took to Twitter to expose his ignorance of or disregard for
the Constitution.

Criminalizing
flag burning is unconstitutional, at least when the flag is burned as a
political statement. As the Supreme Court explained in Texas v. Johnson,
“if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is
that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply
because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

Moreover, there is no indication “either in the text of the Constitution
or in our cases interpreting it . . . that a separate juridical
category exists for the American flag alone.” If someone chooses to
express a political message through flag burning, even if that message
is contempt towards the United States, the Constitution protects that
speech.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who Trump has held up as a model for his Supreme Court nominee, was in the majority in Johnson.

But even setting aside Trump’s unconstitutional call to criminalize flag burning, which became a staple of American conservative politics
long before Trump emerged as a presidential candidate, Trump is calling
for something even more extraordinary.

He wants to strip
citizenship — and with it, voting rights — from political dissidents.
Federal law does permit Americans to lose their citizenship
after “committing any act of treason against, or attempting by force to
overthrow, or bearing arms against, the United States,” but flag
burning is a far cry from treason or armed rebellion. It is a political
statement, and democracy depends on the free expression of political
ideas.

The
president-elect of the United States has proposed stripping a political
protester’s very status as an American. In the process, he would take
away that person’s ability to vote — and thus to vote for someone other
than Donald Trump.

Today, Trump proposes this consequence for a very
specific category of speech that most Americans view as odious. But once
a person’s voting rights can be made contingent upon their beliefs, or
their silence, then elections become increasingly meaningless.